What allows us to think about the urban materialities and representations that concern an array of 19 sovereign nations, several territories and dependencies as a unified whole? Inspired by the reflections brought together in Urban Latin America: Images, Words, Flows and the Built Environment (Routledge 2018), a 13-chapter book that was recently co-edited by Bianca Freire-Medeiros, this talk interrogates the potentialities and limits of the “Latin American city” as a heuristic category.

About the Speaker

Bianca Freire-Medeiros is Sociology Professor at the University of São Paulo (USP). She is the coordinator of UrbanData, a bibliographic databank on urban Brazil which is affiliated with the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM). Her book Touring Poverty (Routledge, 2013; 2015), as well as the documentary film based on her research project, A Place to Take Away (2012), have been praised both in and outside academia. Her work has been published in several languages and she was a Visiting Researcher at Princeton University, Colegio de Mexico and Lancaster University, and a Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She has supervised 22 graduate students and has been a reader on more than 70 Dissertation/Thesis committees in Brazil and abroad. Her most recent publication is Urban Latin America: images, words, flows and the built environment (Routledge Archictexts Series, 2018) that she co-edited with Julia O’Donnell. Her current research interests include transnational mobilities (tourism and migration), urban inequality and its interface with consumption and leisure practices, and innovative research methodologies.